The only bit of excitement I’ve experienced about this, was when they announced it will be force-disabled in Europe, so I didn’t have to turn it off myself
Oh don’t worry, it’s coming to the eu
That’s horrible news
Tbf, it’s opt-in for now, so it isn’t that bad yet.
They need to release Apple Strength and Apple Dexterity to make the experience more complete
That would require Apple wisdom
Hard to argue against a nice quality build.
I feel like this can be generalized to AI in general for most people. I still don’t see much usefulness or quality in output in the scenarios where I’ve been exposed to AI LLMs.
I feel the same way about AI as I felt about the older generation of smartphone voice assistants. The error rate remains high enough that i would never trust it to do anything important without double checking its work. For most tasks, the effort that goes into checking and correcting the output is comparable to the effort I would have spent to just do it myself, so I just do it myself.
Even with other forms of generative AI, there are very few notable uses for it that isn’t just a gimmick/having fun with it, and not in a way achievable via other means.
Being able to add a thing to a photo is neat, but also questionably useful, when it is also doable with a few minutes of Photoshop.
I’ve a friend who claims it can be useful for scripts and quick data processing, but I’ve personally not had that experience when giving it a spin.
It’s a nice way to search for content or answers without all the ads that websites have nowadays. Of course, it’s only a matter of time until the AI/LLM responses are surrounded by (or embedded with) ads as well.
Shitposting has never been easier though!
As a novice with little training, I’ve found AI to be helpful with running a server. Other than that, I depend on my own internet searches for info.
Yup. Photo cleanup was cool to try once, but I’ll never use it again. Removing stuff from photos with a single tap also bugs me a bit in general, I’m not sure it’s something we should make so easy. Message summaries are absolute shit and have already caused confusion for me. I’m not even talking about the proper notification summaries, just the auto-summaries in the preview lines of the whole iMessage list. A number of them have really fucked with me. For example, a friend asked me to FaceTime her in a few days, and the summary just said “FaceTime request.” And I was like “shit, did I miss a call?” As far as I can tell I can’t turn that off without disabling the entire AI setting.
I’m also not sure how to feel about all of Apple’s privacy talk when it comes to their AI features. They say certain features will stay on device, which is great, but for everything else, as far as I’ve noticed there is no mention of what goes to OpenAI’s servers, since their AI is still primarily powered by OpenAI. There’s actually no mention of OpenAI in any of the disclaimers or warnings I read when I first enabled it.
Apple Intelligence isn’t “powered by OpenAI” at all. It’s not even based on it.
The only time OpenAI servers are contacted is when you ask Siri something it can’t compute with Apple Intelligence, but even then it clearly asks the user first if they want to send the request to ChatGPT.
Everything else regarding Apple Intelligence runs either on-device or on their “Private Cloud Compute” infrastructure, which apparently uses M2 Ultra chips. You then have to trust Apple that their claims regarding privacy are true, but you kind of do that when choosing an iPhone in the first place. There’s some pretty interesting tech behind this actually.
I appreciate the clarification! I definitely misinterpreted the reporting about this, and clearly didn’t dig deeply enough. This makes me feel a bit better about using the non-ChatGPT features.
I went into settings on my phone and disabled it immediately
I gotta be honest, the push notification summaries are more annoying than they are useful. Like. I’m going to read a text blurb of 100 or so characters. It’s an extra step to see the summary and then the actual message itself.
As the general rule I feel the same about more or less all of the “AI” that is available to consumers from the likes of Google, OpenAI, etc.
It just seems more like a different way to do things with digital assistants or search engines that we have already been able to do for years.
IMHO, they have pretty different use cases. For example, I can’t use a search engine to compose things.
Probably worth noting, this survey was taken before 18.2 went live with a ChatGPT integration, image generation, etc.
Even with integrations, a lot of the automatic replies basically boil down to “yes, thanks” and “no thank you” to every text. It isn’t even like… A longer message. It’s just two or three words, tops. If I’m going to use AI to write my texts, it’s going to be for something longer than a “yes lol” text.
Agreed.
IMHO, the only truly useful thing is writing tools and Siri being able to query ChatGPT for complex questions instead of telling people to pull out their phone and search the web.
The stuff everyone was actually interested in is likely in 18.4. On-screen awareness, integration with installed apps, contextual replies, etc.
I have 18.2 and don’t even see how to use the AI features. The only thing I bothered to look up so far was how to use genmoji. But the option still doesn’t display in iMessage so I have no idea. Might as well not exist for all I can tell.
Weird. New installs usually get some sort on onboarding screen that explains how to activate the new stuff.
The 18.2 Chat GPT stuff can be manually enabled under settings > Apple intelligence > scroll way down > Chat GPT. Once enabled, writing tools and Siri will give you the option to send a query to ChatGPT instead of Apple’s model.
If Siri gets stumped, it will ask if you want to query GPT. Or you can just prompt it to Ask Chat GPT ______.
Writing tools has it buried under “compose” which is at the very bottom of the writing tools sheet.
Oh, good point
From my experience iOS actually got dumber. At least the keyboard did, which is annoying. There’s a certain way how keys responded to what you typed which has been a thing since the first iPhone. But two updates ago or so, they butchered it completely (especially if you type in German), making texting pretty difficult at times. I’ve asked other users and some of them experience the same issues in that certain keys just do not want to get tapped sometimes because the algorithm expects something else, making hitboxes of unwanted keys way too big. Needlesly to say I’m not ready to trust Apple’s Intelligence just yet.
I experience this way too much. I have a nostaligia for when all of the problems I had with computers (broadly) were because I did something wrong… not because the computer is trying to fix something or guess something or anticipate something. Just let me type.
Yesterday, I typed out the letters of a word I wanted, and after typing a second word, I saw my iPhone “correct” the first word I typed to something else entirely. NO. Stop assuming I made a mistake. You cause more problems than you solve.
It’s crazy because they’ve tried to ‘fix’ something that wasn’t broken at all. It was one of the best features. Most users didn’t even notice there was an algorithm behind their keyboard. It just felt natural. But now it’s so aggressive, texting can almost feel like a warzone.
Much like many of us see no value in apple products.
I’m very much enjoying the GenMoji stuff. Being able to send or react with an emoji tailored to the situation is not useful, but it’s fun when you come up with a good one.
Also Siri is definitely more functional than it used to be. It understands when I correct myself or change my mind. Very handy. Still far from perfect though.
Also on iPad all the AI-driven handwriting cleanup and stuff is really nice when taking notes.
But otherwise it’s not super useful. I don’t like the notification summaries, they aren’t very good. Though they are sometimes hilarious. Like Ring being summarized as “Thirteen people at your door and gunshots heard.”
How do you use genmoji? Is it not rolled out to everyone on 18.2? I looked on YouTube and it’s showing that an an option in iMessage that doesn’t display for me.
Gotta have iPhone 15 Pro, 16, or 16 Pro, unfortunately. Or an M-series iPad.
I have that. Still not getting the option.
Ah! Have you previously enabled Apple Intelligence? I think in 18.1 there was a queue thing to set it up. Could be that. I also vaguely remember there being something it had to download for the image stuff. Check in Settings, maybe? I was half asleep when I got it working so I don’t remember too well.
Thanks I think I figured it out. I had siri set to German, but once I switched it to English it started displaying in iMessage. Still says it’s downloading so can’t actually use it yet. Must be English exclusive?
Not surprising, I vaguely recall them saying they would roll out other language support over time.
This whole staged rollout very much smells of, “We were caught out by the industry shifting hard to AI and, despite including neural engines in our chips for a while, we weren’t ready.”
I appreciate the summaries on my notifications. Some of my people text a book every time.
Genmoji is a waste of space. The image generation is really bad (but then again, most of these platforms are). The writing tools are mediocre. About all that is moderately useful is that Siri seems a little better and processing commands.
If they want to start charging for this, I’m out.
If they want to start charging for this, I’m out.
I’m not sure why they would charge for it, most of it happens on-device.
True, but the RnD ain’t cheap. And, if everyone else starts charging (as I am sure they eventually will), Apple will follow.
That’s why Apple charges an arm and a leg for RAM.
For me the best new feature on macOS is the ability to natively put the temperature in the menu bar. You click on it, and it gives you some more info and from there can launch the full weather app.
It’s a small addition and could have been there for a decade, but I like it a lot.
It still needs to learn. I’m personally trying to opt out of it watching everything I do, will have to be some pretty serious benefits for me to revert.
How long does it take to learn? It should be able to scan all of my files locally and I should be able to search for songs by lyrics or images by description and metadata locally. It supposedly has GitHub copilot like functionality in xcode…
